The major issue with the talent isn't necessarily the extra cooldown to babysit. If you just pushed the button, got +9% damage, and had to refresh it whenever you could, it wouldn't be a big deal.

The problem is it stacks, and is so punishing to lose the stack. Drop the stack off, rather through your own mistake or inattention, or through fight mechanics that make you lose control of your character, and you have to spend:

- 90 energy
- 3 GCD
- Major cycle disruption

That's a hell of an opportunity cost that's more expensive than even its high face value shows. Bringing the stack back up means your SnD will likely drop off, your rupture uptime will drop off, you won't have the energy to use Tricks on the tank or give the 15% damage boost to top DPS, you're wasting energy instead of using it to do damage and keep poisons up with Mutilate, and if you have no warrior sundering, Expose Armor might be falling off.

Granted, you can overcome some of this with creative use of your abilities. Vanishing prior to rebuilding your stacks will reduce the energy cost of each application by 10, saving you some energy, but it still hurts.

I can see them wanting to punish mistakes by lowering DPS, but this just feels too punitive, especially seeing as how many fights force you to lose control of your character. And isn't the loss of the 9% buff bad enough on its own, without essentially resetting the rogue and making them start from scratch in their "warm up" cycle?